For those of you who do not know this, May is mental health awareness month. Mental illness is defined by staff at the Mayo Clinic as a wide range of mental health conditions - disorders that affect your mood, thinking and behavior. Examples of mental illness include depression, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia, eating disorders and addictive behaviors. Many people have mental health concerns from time to time. But a mental health concern becomes a mental illness when ongoing signs and symptoms cause frequent stress and affect your ability to function. A mental illness can make you miserable and can cause problems in your daily life, such as at work or in relationships. In most cases, symptoms can be managed with a combination of medications and counseling (psychotherapy).

So, why do we need to raise awareness? As with anything else, it is important to learn more about mental illness in order understand it so that we can reduce or eliminate the negative stigma attached to mental illness. If you do not think some people see mental illness as a negative thing, ask them how they feel about seeing a psychiatrist or getting counseling to help them cope with a current or past situation and the answer some will give is "I'm not crazy." If that is not negative stigma, I don't know what is and it is unwarranted. I want to share with you some statistics from the National Alliance of Mental Illness and I will leave you with that.

Prevalence of Mental Illness

•Approximately 1 in 5 adults in the U.S. - 43.7 million, or 18.6% - experiences mental illness in a given year.

•Approximately 1 in 25 adults in the U.S. - 13.6 million, or 4.1% - experiences a serious mental illness in a given year that substantially interferes with or limits one or more major life activities.

•Approximately 1 in 5 youth aged 13-18 (21.4%) experiences a severe mental disorder in a given year. For children aged 8-15, the estimate is 13%.

•1.1% of adults in the U.S. live with schizophrenia.

•2.6% of adults in the U.S. live with bipolar disorder.

•6.9% of adults in the U.S. - 16 million - had at least one major depressive episode in the past year.

•18.1% of adults in the U.S. experienced an anxiety disorder such as posttraumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder and specific phobias.

•Among the 20.7 million adults in the U.S. who experienced a substance use disorder, 40.7% - 8.4 million adults - had a co-occurring mental illness.

Social Stats

•An estimated 26% of homeless adults staying in shelters live with serious mental illness and an estimated 46% live with severe mental illness and/or substance use disorders.

•Approximately 20% of state prisoners and 21% of local jail prisoners have "a recent history" of a mental health condition.

•70% of youth in juvenile justice systems have at least one mental health condition and at least 20% live with a serious mental illness.

•Half of all chronic mental illness begins by age 14; three-quarters by age 24. Despite effective treatment, there are long delays - sometimes decades - between the first appearance of symptoms and when people get help.